On Sunday January 17 it is the Ride to Pool day at the Coburg Olympic Pool. This was a spectacular day last year and promises to be again, with music and dancing, swimming fun on the pool inflatable and in the jumping castle. Friends of the Coburg Olympic Pool will be selling some t-shirts and there will be a sausage sizzle.
The music line up is:
2.00 - 2.30pm Que Paso (bluegrass band)
2.45 - 3.15pm Nicola Lester.
3.30 - 4.00pm Nick Murphy
4.15 - 4.45pm Ross McLennan
5.00 - 5.40pm Short Order Chefs
Entry is free as Christine Campbell, the member for Pascoe Vale, is sponsoring the event. The pool will be open usual weekend hours from 11-6. Pass it on and see you there!
by Kitty Owens
Coburg Olympic Pool, secret oasis of the north, is now open for the summer season. The plantings of succulents out the front are doing well and suit the retro frontage of the pool. Grab your bathers and tell your friends to meet you under the peppercorn trees!
Upcoming events include a free event celebrating the start of the season on Sunday 13th, 11-6pm - the inflatables will be out. A pool party with bands is being planned for mid January, in partnership with the Friends of Coburg Olympic Pool.
Last year there was a big jump in attendances for the season (15 000) even though the pool had been closed for two years. Let’s build on the success of the community in getting the pool re-opened, and make the most of our lovely creekside pool and picnic area this season.
See you in the lap lane!
by Janet Grigg
A couple of weekends ago, a few of the Friends of Coburg Pool (FCOP) met out the front of the pool armed with succulents from our gardens, compost, gardening tools and mulch for a spot of guerrilla gardening. We had noticed how sad the bed out the front looked and decided to do something about it. After an assessment of the soil (dry and water repellent) and consideration of plant placement, we decided to work on the long bed. Soil replenishment and planting then began in earnest. By the time we'd finished, it looked so much better.
If anyone is passing by, I'm sure the new plants would appreciate some water, maybe from your water bottle if you are nearly home. There is still another garden bed at the entrance to the pool with a weed tree (cotoneaster) that needs to be removed and that could could do with some plants. Perhaps another group might decide to do some more guerrilla gardening? Every time I go past on the bus and see the garden we planted still there and growing, I get a little thrill. By the time summer comes, I'm sure the garden will have grown, filling out the bed some more and be looking even more magnificent.
by Melissa Alexander
The wind has been bitterly cold of late and it’s hard to imagine that in only a few more months we will be swimming in our beloved outdoor pool. After such a long fight to get Coburg Olympic Pool re-opened, summer seemed even sweeter as we relished every minute of swimming, splashing, picnicking and barbequing at Coburg’s favourite watering hole. Now that our pool is under threat again, I’m glad we stayed until the very last minute during the heat wave we call January. Leaving the cool depths of the pool, the shade of the paper barks and willows and the riverside ambience to go back to our hotbox houses seemed unthinkable.
Now our beloved pool is facing a major re-development. Within one summer we have gone from trying to keep the pool open to trying to preserve it from the clutches of unnecessary development. The concept plan of the Coburg Initiative (original link to www.thecoburginitiative.com.au/ is now broken) shows the demolition of the Coburg Leisure Centre to make way for a residential housing development and has the Coburg Olympic Pool and surrounds earmarked as the preferred location for a super-duper whiz bang aquatic facility. The line that we keep hearing from the council and the developers is that “Coburg doesn’t need two pools”. Well, here is a newsflash, which from all the community consultation should already be ringing alarm bells for the initiative people. Neither the Kodak site nor central Coburg has people living in them yet. Pentridge Village is still being built and already our local community services are stretched to full capacity, struggling to provide basic community needs. I cannot get my children into swimming lessons, the kinder has a waiting list that could fill three kindergartens, there is no local high school and the public transport system is failing miserably. At the risk of stating the obvious, cutting down our pool from one to two does not equal more services for more people, it equals less. Just imagine what this will mean when there are 20,000 more homes in the municipality.
The two pools have completely different functions and purposes and to change either one would be a huge loss to the entire municipality. The Coburg Leisure Centre is easily accessible by public transport and conveniently located for many people, particularly the elderly. After visiting the centre it’s logical that while you’re in Coburg you will do the shopping, go to the library, pop in to the post office and meet friends in the mall for coffee. The Coburg Olympic Pool on the other hand is on the bike path and readily accessible for families and young people who wish to spend the whole day lazing by the pool, jumping off the diving board, swimming laps or playing in the wading pool with the little ones. The outdoor pool took over from the local park and neighbourhood house and functioned as the village square over the summer months. I am not trying to show that there are disparate groups of people using the pools; this is not always the case, what I’m trying to show is that both pools serve completely different purposes and both are used by our community for many different reasons.
The embodied energy of both the pools is not factored into the equation when arguments about sustainability and energy use come into play. Yes, we agree that pools are huge energy guzzlers and it would be very easy for the council to close one down and subsequently talk about how green they are. Surely it is better to have a couple of communal facilities used by everyone than for individuals in the neighbourhood to have their own? Surely it is smarter, greener, more sustainable to keep what we have and improve on it rather than bulldoze existing facilities to build new ones? Surely we would save more energy walking to the pool than driving? To me that means having more quality facilities not less.
I have been to a couple of the consultation groups and I felt the biggest concern of the community was keeping and extending on our green and public space. After a look at the draft plan it seems that housing is encroaching on our communal space, it is certainly encroaching on our pool space. We need more houses and more green space, both are required for healthy, happy communities. We need to say to the developers definitively what we require and we need to say it loud, for once it’s gone we will never be able to reclaim it. Let’s save Coburg Olympic Pool until we can swim in the lake again, after all that’s what the outdoor pool was built for; we had polluted our water system too much to use it for anything but looking at.
On Sunday the 15th of March Belgravia Leisure is hosting an end of season pool party at the Coburg Olympic Pool from 11.00 am til 6.00pm. There will be free entry, inflatable pool toys and a sausage sizzle.
Even if it ends up being too cold for a proper swim, it would be nice to hang out on the grass and enjoy our pool one last time before it closes at the end of March until December.
We've also started a Facebook page which you can find here.
Each Wednesday during February (that's the 4th, the 11th, the 18th and the 25th) there will be an early morning swimming session at Coburg Olympic Pool from 6.30am to 8.30am. Perfect for that swim before work. Or perhaps a chance to do some laps without the children. Or maybe a chance to enjoy the pool before the busyness and/or heat of the day.
The Friends of The Coburg Olympic Pool are contributing some of the money raised at Pool Together towards these mornings. We've thought all along that the pool really needs to be open early in the morning to reach full potential as a lap swimming venue. So this is an opportunity to test the waters and show that there is a demand for this timeslot.
It would be great if readers of this site could spread the word about the Wednesday in February early swim sessions to other pool users or anyone else who might be interested. We've also just started a Friends of Coburg Olympic Pool page on Facebook. So if anyone wants to become a fan and spread the word....
Of course it's also pretty obvious that there's a demand for opening hours between 8.30am and 11.00am and again at the end of the day, particularly on hot nights. So expect a new campaign around opening hours soon. Let us know your thoughts.
What a gorgeous day at the pool! The weather couldn't have been better and about 600 people turned up. There was music and dancing, fun on the inflatable pool thingy, bouncing in the bouncing castle and sausages a sizzling. Not to mention our beautiful pool and the grass and shady trees that surround it. It's impossible for photos to capture just how awesome this day was but you get the idea! If anyone else has any photos they'd like to share, we now have a fledgling flickr group or you can email them to me at janetmgrigg@gmail.com.
1. t-shirts were in demand, 2. jumping castle, 3. learn to swim pool, 4. robin and sunny, 5. from the entrance, 6. from the terrace looking down to the big pool, 7. diving board in action, 8. lining up for the inflatable, 9. mel watching Newland Creak, 10. merri, sunny and some other children dancing to Newland Creak, 11. watching kids on the inflatable, 12. relaxing at the end of the day, 13. learn to swim pool, 14. splash into the diving pool, 15. lifeguard at learn to swim pool, 16. andy, 17. talking by the pool, 18. bike, 19. nick waves for the camera, 20. looking over the big pool Created with fd's Flickr Toys.
Perhaps the words someone handed to me at the end of the day tell the story the best;
"18th Jan 2008, band a playin', bikes in the distance. The surrounding green like nowhere else I know in this town. Kids breakdancing to the band that's by no means hip hop. But it's community, it's diversity, it's adding to the colour of our moods. On this sunday, on this sunday."
Coburg Olympic Pool is open from 1st of December 2009 until 31st of March 2010 every day. Weekdays between 11 am and 7 pm and weekends 11 am - 6 pm.
ph 9354 2096
See you in the lap lane or on the grass under a beautiful shady tree!
